Technology

Reporting Wheel

The challenge:

Community health workers and other remote field staff are closest to important information. Texting words is more complex and error prone, and voice calls are too long or expensive, but they still need a way to report data accurately over mobile phones.

The tool:

The Reporting Wheel is a non-electronic device that simplifies data reporting for the most remote workers, including those with literacy challenges. It consists of small cardboard wheels that can “encode” a series of values or pictograms to report into a number that can be sent in via an IVR, USSD or SMS, and a backend service that collects the reports and assists an administrator in defining a wheel and configuring the interactive voice responses. Because the wheels are so simple to build and are intuitive to use, health workers can train each other very rapidly and accurately on how to use them, which in large-scale deployments can translate to large costs savings in training and support.

More information:

For more information, please check out this blog post by Nicolás di Tada, our Director of Platform Engineering here.